1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to full-duplex MAC designs and more specifically to improving the scheduling for when each node will transmit and receive data in full-duplex.
2. Introduction
All network-capable computing devices have unique identifiers assigned to them at manufacture, enabling communications with other network-capable computing devices. These unique identifiers are called Media Access Control addresses and serve to identify the computing device when communicating with other computing devices, either wirelessly or via a wired connection. With wired connections, transmit and receive signals are kept separate by using separate pins and wires for transmitting and receiving communications. However when the computing device communicates wirelessly specific protocols ensure that both the transmitting device and the receiving device are effectively engaged. These protocols rely upon the Media Access Control addresses of individual computing devices while affecting the Media Access Control sub-layer of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) model. Because these protocols effectively control all incoming and outgoing communications, the protocols for managing communications are themselves simply referred to as the MAC.
The MAC is responsible for arbitrating the frequency channel between different computing devices, or nodes, communicating in a network. The MAC utilizes a scheduler which determines which nodes have information to communicate and when each of those nodes will communicate with one another. While various versions of MAC scheduling exist, these previous MAC versions were not designed for scheduling full-duplex communications, where both the first communication node and the second communication node are transmitting and receiving on a single channel simultaneously.